Celestial Matters

by Garfinkle, Richard

  I stepped into the light, and the knots of talking people drifted apart as I passed among them. Captain Yellow Hare faded into the shadows as silence came to the meadow.

  The students seated themselves cross-legged on the ground in attentive rows, while the scholars perched on the marble benches. The young had come to hear what it was like to command a League project, to develop weapons for the good of the state. The old wanted to know what that weapon was. With Kleio’s aid I planned to disappoint all of them.

  “May Athena and Aristotle bless this assemblage with wisdom and knowledge,” I said. The assemblage made the obligatory response. The students leaned forward like grass before the wind; the scholars steepled their hands and sat straight backed. “Tonight, my subject is history; my thesis is that nine centuries ago the Akademe abandoned the study of philosophy for that of science, and that abandonment was done not for the glory of Athena but for political reasons.”

  “What is this nonsense?” a querulous voice warbled from the back bench. Pisistratos, one of my teachers in Ouranology, forced himself to his feet, fighting the natural tendency of ninety-year-old bones to remain seated. “What are you babbling about, Aias?”

  I flinched slightly; harsh words from a hated teacher could still cut deep. Pisistratos had been particularly vicious to me in my youth; he had confidently asserted that I would never be a scientist, he had sulked when I flirted with fame, and he had gloated when I had faded away for two decades. No doubt he resented my recent return to glory, and no doubt he was pleased at the folly of my topic.

  “This is a lecture on the history and purpose of the Akademe,” I said. “You need not stay if you do not wish to learn.”

  Several scholars stood up and left, not even following the common practice of slinking quietly into the orchard to escape dull lectures. But most remained as if chained to their benches by my celebrity. Pisistratos stayed as well; I knew he was waiting for a chance to challenge me publicly and remind the Akademe that Aias the commander had for a long time been Aias, “that fool dabbling in history.”

  I kept silence until the last straggler had left. “Does anyone know why Athenians, of all the peoples of the League, developed science to explain the mysteries of nature?”

  I waited, but the only sound in the grove was the chittering of Egyptian scarabs warring over nuts and fruits with European squirrels.

  “What is the cornerstone of science?” I asked, needing some response from them before my talk could go forward.

  Chorus of students: “Experimentation!”

  Now I had them. “Who discovered experimentation?”

  The students looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. I could almost hear their thoughts. Experimentation is the way things are done. One might as well ask who discovered breathing or pouring libations to the gods.

  Pisistratos narrowed his eyes and leaned forward into a hunter’s posture. When I had made a complete fool of myself, he would spring and gut me with a well-placed aphorism.

  A Cretan boy with matted black hair and a straggly beard spoke up from the fourth row of students. His harsh Minoan accent and his uncertain speech reminded me of myself at his age. “Aristotle was the first to perform an experiment.”

  “Why?”

  The boy’s comrades looked at him with sober frowns, but the gleam in their eyes was all too familiar to me. They were happy to watch one of their own make a fool of himself. “Sir,” he asked, “what do you mean why?”

  I leaned back, clasped my hands behind my head, and gazed up at the pockmarked moon. “What motive did Aristotle have to do something no one had ever done before?”

  “Um … uh…” The boy stammered into silence. He glanced around like a hunted deer seeking escape from pursuing hounds. Then he looked at Pisistratos and pleaded silently for help.

  The old man gathered up his dignity and the hem of his robe and strode forward to battle me. The students parted for him like wheat before the wind. “Aias, why do you waste our time? This is an institute of science. That is all we study.”

  “That is precisely my point. Why is science all we study?”

  He threw up his hands in melodramatic disgust. “Would you rather we wasted our time with Platonist dithering on the nature of ideal forms while the Middle Kingdom conquered us with their impossible Taoist science?”

  I knew that dirty word “Platonist” would come out eventually. “No, Pisistratos, I do not want to waste our time on that nonsense. But I do want the students to know how we came to study science and nothing else.”

  He let out an exaggerated sigh. “What else is worth studying?”

  Pisistratos was finally debating me, giving me a chance to make my case. But I didn’t let my happiness blind me to the Sokratic trap he’d laid. I framed my counterquestion carefully. “Can science be studied without knowing anything else?”

  Pisistratos sidestepped like a bull dancer. “What other subject do you need? Philosophy? Theology? Ethics? Perhaps drama and comedy are used in your secret research, but I have never needed them.”

  “History is needed in my work.”

  He lowered an eyebrow, twisting his lined face into a frown. All eyes fixed on him. Watching scholars debate has been the favorite sport of students ever since Sokrates faced off against the Sophists.

  “History. What can history tell you?”

  I offered a prayer of thanks to Kleio for guiding me and felt her breath on my back filling me with divine strength. “Tell me, Pisistratos, would you ever impregnate fertile earth with fire?”

  He glared at me, adding wrinkles of annoyance to the map of his face. “Of course not; it would explode.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He snorted majestically, a sacred bull ready for sacrifice. “Every educated person knows that.”

  I leaned forward and pointed toward his emaciated stomach. “But how do you know it?”

  He waved airily toward the north edge of the orchard. “Because, one hundred and fifty years ago the hero Kofites blew himself to pieces trying to do exactly that.”

  I bowed my head as if acknowledging his mastery. The moonlight shimmered down through the silver cage, casting a checkered pattern on his sneering face.

  “Then you use history to avoid past mistakes,” I said quietly.

  “But—”

  I cut him off. The knowledge I had gathered through years spent in the neglected archives of the Akademe poured out of my lips, overwhelming him with an epic tale of the labor thousands of scholars had performed in the last nine centuries of painful research to determine the myriad facts every educated person knew.

  “Everyone in the world knows something of the past,” I said. “Family history, the history of their particular fields of science. Some, like the best Spartans, know military history. But the Akademe does not want its students to know its own history. Why?”

  The audience looked eagerly at Pisistratos. They wanted an answer to my question. But he didn’t know it, so their heads turned back to face me. And Pisistratos walked in stiff-necked stubbornness back to his seat.

  I paused to gather my thoughts and drink again the wine of Kleio’s inspiration. Then I began to speak.

  “The Akademe,” I said, “is not primarily a place of knowledge, but of war.”

  Silence.

  “The supposedly equal partnership between Athens and Sparta that has ruled the Delian League since its founding is dominated by Spartan thinking.”

  A questioning rustle.

  “To prove this, I will lay out three examples from the history of science; I will start with the most recent and progress backward to the time of Aristotle and Alexander.”

  The wind stilled and even the scarabs and squirrels quieted at the mention of those heroes.

  “The first event I will discuss happened only forty years ago.”

  The eyes of the assembled students brightened. They knew what I would speak about: the first voyage to the moon.

  At t
hat time the classical school of Ouranology said such a journey would be impossible because there was a Sphere of Fire between Earth and Selene and there was no air beyond that sphere, only unbreathable ether. But the modern school denied the existence of the Sphere of Fire and claimed that air extended all through the universe out to the Sphere of Fixed Stars.

  I told my audience how the modern school was proved right when Kroisos and Miltiades crashed the first celestial ship, Selene’s Chariot, on the moon, and returned in triumph, flying on a piece of celestial matter they had carved out of the moon itself. The wonders of the spheres became available for study, and the science of Ouranology flourished because of their efforts. The students would have cheered, but that would have been contrary to Akademe etiquette.

  “But,” I said, “It was not for the sake of Ouranology that those two great men risked their lives. They went to Selene because Sparta wanted flying weapons, platforms to seize the skies from the domination of the Middle Kingdom.”

  The divine voice rushed through me, filling my thoughts. I could no longer see my audience; I could only speak Kleio’s words.

  I vaulted back three centuries for my second instance. At that time the Middle Kingdom had just invented battle kites and our ground troops had no defenses against them. To counter this advantage Sparta needed thousands of huge evac cannons to shoot them down. The generals demanded that the scholars produce the vast supply of fire-gold needed to rarify the air inside these cannons.

  The Akedeme dragooned all its pyrologists and geologists, their task to turn the production of fire-enriched metals from a slow, dangerous, complex task to a simple, safe, easy one. Ten years and ten million obols later, they succeeded. In the process two fields of science were advanced, and float carts, capsule tubes, and a thousand other modern conveniences based on fire-metals were made practical, but again those were side effects of military demands.

  To complete my trinity of examples, I looked back six hundred years to a time when the League’s armies were too large to be fed on their extended campaigns. Sparta called on Athens for help and spontaneous-generation research became the most important subject at the Akademe. Seven years of work led the hero Aigistos to discover the formula for producing cows from garbage. Armies could now travel where they wanted for as long as they needed.

  “As an afterthought he eliminated hunger throughout the League,” I said, “and he sparked the First Indian Rebellion.”

  I had made clear the dominance of Sparta over Athens; now I had to show that that dominance came about through political machination. I went backward nine centuries to speak about the two heroes who had chained the Akademe to the battlefield: Alexander and Aristotle.

  The scarred moon had fallen behind the heads of the students, limning the grove of varied trees in a ghostly aura. I imagined Alexander and Aristotle standing on this very spot under a moon untouched by man. The young general asked the old philosopher-turned-scientist for help in remaking the Delian League into a force that could conquer the Middle Kingdom. Legend said they worked under a divine vision of the future, but the dusty chronicles in the cellars of the Akademe said otherwise.

  I paused to catch my breath for a moment; Kleio also paused, pulling away from my mind so that I might recover from the throes of her epistasy.

  I looked at my audience for the first time in an hour. The scholars weren’t bored anymore. They leaned forward, their hands were knotted in their robes, their eyes were bright with interest. The students rocked back and forth on their crossed legs. Their faces were rapt like maenads about to tear apart a goat for the glory of Dionysos.

  Before Kleio would take my mind again, Athena stepped in and stopped my voice with sudden wisdom. Pallas made me look at the scholars and students and understand that they had not heard what I had said. I had told them the bloody history of the Akademe, and they were proud of it. If I told them the truth about Alexander and Aristotle, they’d ignore me. Crazy Aias, they’d think, hope the Archons don’t expect much from his work.

  The pressure of their attention washed over me with a wave of fatiguing realization. It would make no difference to them if I told this assemblage that Aristotle had connived with Alexander to purge the Platonists from the Akademe by force.

  If I proved to them that the founder of modern science had sacrificed his philosophy to make weapons for a boy who thought he was a god long before his death and apotheosis, it would not matter. These pursuers of truth would not care that Aristotle gave up his vision of uniting all knowledge so he could become master of the school founded by Plato, the teacher he hated.

  I stood poised between two goddesses, both of whom claimed my allegiance. I did not know then why Athena counseled the speaking of falsehoods in her home, though I believe I do now. I begged Kleio’s forgiveness and opened my mouth to pour forth in thunderous rendition the legend of two heroes and their divine vision of science and military working together for the good of all.

  When I ceased my oration, the scholars and students rose as one and thanked me for showing them the value of history. Even old Pisistratos apologized for his earlier behavior.

  I turned away from them, and from the shadowed woods I saw Captain Yellow Hare glaring at me with the look of disgust Spartans reserved for cowards. But then something settled on her shoulders and her expression softened to one of puzzlement. Did she know I had betrayed the goddess I had promised to serve, and what spirit spoke to her and removed her anger? Never having dared to ask, I still do not know the answer to that; I can only guess that she too saw history’s Muse in Athena’s grove and shared something of my inspiration.

  Yellow Hare led me back to the visiting scholars’ quarters and stalked out of the room to stand guard.

  A slave brought me a bowl of wine which I poured out on the marble floor, a libation to Kleio. Then I lay down on the couch, and as I fell asleep I fancied I heard the two goddesses conferring. Both sounded pleased. Why? I wondered as ’Upnos clutched me. Why were neither Wisdom nor History angry?

  γ

  I was pulled from a welter of unrecalled dreams by the undertones of a whispered argument that drifted through the curtains of my quarters like the first late autumn breeze that hinted of winter.

  “What is going on here?” demanded a voice with an Indian accent. It took me a moment to recognize it: Ramonojon! Thank the gods, he was safe. “Where is Aias?”

  “Commander Aias is inside,” I heard Captain Yellow Hare say. “You may not go in.”

  I sat upright on my sleeping couch, tossed the linen blanket to the floor, threw on the robes I had worn the night before, and stepped through the curtain. Yellow Hare instantly placed herself between me and Ramonojon and waved her hand to keep me from coming too close.

  “Aias,” Ramonojon said. “What is all this? Why are you under guard?”

  Ramonojon had become much thinner during his month’s absence; his short Indian tunic and skirt hung very loosely on his wiry frame. There was a haggard look in his eyes, as if he hadn’t slept in ages. His skin had become hard, as if he had been put through a tannery. And his voice and face had a strange placidity, as if he had not spent every one of the fifty years of life in constant thought.

  “It’s all right, Captain,” I said to Yellow Hare. “I vouch for Senior Dynamicist Ramonojon.” I turned to my Indian friend. “Come into my quarters and I’ll explain.”

  My bodyguard stood to the side and ushered Ramonojon past me through the hanging draperies. She followed us in, keeping her piercing golden gaze fixed on my friend.

  Ramonojon tilted his head and looked at me expectantly.

  “I was attacked on the way back to Athens.”

  His eyes widened and his face took on the look of startlement that had made many a superficial judge of character think him simple. Then he blinked as if he realized what his face looked like; he took four slow, deep breaths and his expression melted back into this mysterious new passivity.

  “Attacked?” he asked, as if I ha
d just told him a snippet of innocuous gossip.

  “A battle kite appeared in the Mediterranean skies and tried to sink the merchantman I was traveling on.”

  “A battle kite? Here? That’s—” He cut himself off and took four more breaths. “How can that be?” he said.

  I could not muster up an answer. The distance he was trying to maintain between us was hard to fathom. All I could do was study his face going through its cycles of astonishment, breath, and control. It was like watching an actor prepare for a role he was not yet comfortable with.

  “Has something happened to you?” I asked. “Did you have any trouble on the way back from India?”

  “No, Aias,” he said, “my journey was uneventful. Tell me more about the attack on you.”

  As I told the tale, I watched his eyes and mouth grow wide with disbelief. I drew comfort from the normality of those reactions, but, just as Lysander was about to shatter the enemy aircraft with one perfect shot, Ramonojon’s stunned expression vanished into a now perfect expression of disconcerting blankness, as if the actor now knew his part and had donned the mask of a serene demon.

  Unnerved, I tried to dislodge the expression by drawing out the details of the danger, lingering on the near explosion of the steam engine and soaring to unaccustomed heights of oratory as I described my reckless actions to save the ship. But Ramonojon seemed unmoved. My narrative dripped into silence after the point when Captain Yellow Hare took me aboard Lysander.

  Ramonojon was silent for a little while; then in carefully controlled tones he asked, “How long until we can get you back to the safety of our ship?”

  Yellow Hare answered him. “Chandra’s Tear will arrive at the sky dock of Athens one hour after noon.”

  I looked over at the water clock in the northeast corner of the room. We had five hours to wait. The idea of spending that time in the Akademe, being visited by colleagues come to offer congratulations for my “triumph” of the night before, twisted my stomach. I wanted to be gone before anyone else awoke.